Draw the Dark Read Online Free Page B

steam hazed the bathroom. Padding out of the bathroom in a towel, I dumped my clothes in the hamper, thought about doing a load. Only the laundry room reminded me of movies about prison laundries and then I felt the tears start up, and so I got out of there before I could start bawling again.
    Usually Uncle Hank gets home for dinner round about seven, but it was eight thirty now, so I knew it was going to be another late night for him. Or maybe he didn’t want to see me. I made myself a peanut butter sandwich, took a bite, chewed, and then my throat balled, and I had to spit it out. I tossed the sandwich in the garbage.
    I trudged up to my room, flicked on my fan, and lay down on my bed. The sun was almost gone, and my paintings of the sideways place—plum-purple and ruddy orange—looked bloody in the sunset. My head ached as if someone had taken a brick and pounded the top of my skull. I watched shadows creep across the ceiling. Tried not to think and couldn’t
not
think.
    No question: I’d done a number on Eisenmann’s barn. So I had to be sleepwalking—and sleep-
biking
, come to think of it. That was the only explanation for my wet Chucks. The ache in my shoulders and arms was because I’d had to dangle from a rope tied off in the hayloft and needed one hand to keep from falling, the other to paint. The crescents of red paint beneath my nails just confirmed everything.
    Then I thought back to the nightmare of the evening before: horses and blood and men screaming. A pitchfork.
    For some reason, my eyes crawled to my desk. My drawing pad was squared there, a pencil worn almost down to nothing lying on top—and
that
was wrong. That pencil had been sharp the night before. As if in a dream, I opened my pad and started flipping pages ...
    I didn’t start shaking until the next-to-last drawing. Because there was the barn I knew I’d never seen until today.
    And on the very last page: a view of the town from a great distance and high up, from the hay door on the east side of the barn. Had to be. The fields and hills were right, and there was a smudge of lake, the foundry’s smokestacks, and the big square clock tower opposite the town hall—
    And one more building I didn’t recognize at all that had an onion dome, like buildings in Russia. I stared. There was nothing like that in Winter. Not in this life—or world—anyway. And then I thought:
The sideways place?
    My whole body went clammy cold.
That
had never occurred to me before, that it might work like osmosis, you know? Maybe my mother and father could slip in and not get back out. But maybe that meant if something in
there
got out
here
, it couldn’t get back either because a balance had to be kept.
    I remembered that weird muttering, gone now. What if the muttering really wasn’t
me
? What if something was sitting
behind
my eyes,
in
my head?
    “Stop it.” My voice was shaky and sounded really small. “Stop freaking yourself out.”
    But once I’d thought all this, it was impossible not to keep thinking. Uncorking the bottle and letting out the genie: That’s what Aunt Jean used to call it, when you’d get a notion in your head you just couldn’t shake. You can’t unthink a possibility once it’s occurred to you.
    So.
    So what if the thing out at the barn was something that
I
really hadn’t done? What if my
body
had been there, but not
me
?
    I lay there, thinking about that, wondering what if. Then I cried again, pillow over my face in case Uncle Hank came home. While I lay there, my face all damp, I wondered what would happen if I fell asleep with the pillow still on my face. How long would it take for a grown man to suffocate a stupid teenager and would it hurt much . . . ?
    Dumb things like that.
    I don’t remember falling asleep so much as my head got swimmy and my thoughts slipped sideways and

    hot so hot july bright sun that hurts my eyes and dust, the smell of scorched metal because the wind is blowing the wrong way today.
    i run down